Architecture Considerations

Capacity Planning

SharePoint uses storage in several ways and selecting the
appropriate configuration is a key aspect in the overall
performance of the SharePoint collaboration suite. AWS Marketplace
storage product provides storage for the Microsoft SQL Server 2016
databases and for SharePoint Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) which
stores larger binary objects (for example, Visio diagrams,
PowerPoint presentations) within a file system outside the
SharePoint Microsoft SQL database. Microsoft provides detailed
guidance related to SharePoint capacity planning in Storage and
SQL Server capacity planning and configuration (SharePoint Server)
on TechNet that takes into account the type and number of
artifacts you plan to store in your SharePoint environment (see
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc298801(v=office.16).aspx).
This guidance helps you select and size the appropriate Amazon EC2
instances you need to provide database and content storage
capacity, and necessary I/O performance to meet your needs.

Storage performance considerations for SharePoint

Your storage configuration varies based on the requirements you
gather from the SharePoint capacity planning guidance. Amazon EBS
volumes can be configured in a variety of ways (for example, RAID
striping, different volume sizes, etc.) to yield different
performance characteristics. For high I/O scenarios, you can
create and attach additional Amazon EBS volumes, and stripe using
RAID software to increase the total number of I/O operations per
second (IOPS). Each Amazon EBS volume is protected from physical
drive failure through drive mirroring, so using a RAID level
higher than RAID 0 is unnecessary.

Fault Tolerance

For multi-AZ fault tolerance, SoftNAS instances need to be
deployed independently because each instance must reside in a
separate Availability Zone. When you configure SnapReplicate, the
SoftNAS replication component, the Availability Zone of
replication source and target are validated to ensure that the
instances are not in the same Availability Zone.

High Availability

You need to configure each SoftNAS instance with a second network
interface that you’ll use later to establish connectivity for high
availability. The secondary interface is used to create a virtual
IP address within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
The virtual IP address is used as the target for iSCSI and CIFS
storage clients and enables continued connectivity to the SoftNAS
Cloud NAS in the event that the primary instance fails. You can
add the secondary network interface when you create the instance
or at a later time prior to enabling SoftNAS SnapHA.

High-Level Architecture

To implement the Microsoft SharePoint solution described in this
paper includes the following components:

Two AWS Marketplace SoftNAS Cloud NAS instances

Each instance deployed in separate Availability Zones

Each instance deployed with two network interfaces

Each instance deployed with the appropriate number and
configuration of Amazon EBS volumes

SoftNAS Snap Replicate to replicate the source instances to
the target instance

SoftNAS SnapHA to provide high availability and failover
capability between instances

Virtual IP address to provide SoftNAS SnapHA cluster
connectivity (VIP is allocated from an address range outside
the scope of the CIDR block for VPC of each instance)

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